Peckham lost few opportunities of advancing the interests of the Mendicants at the expense of the monks and secular clergy, and of his brother Franciscans against the other Orders. The discipline and morals of the nuns of Godstow had suffered owing to the proximity of their house to the university-town, and the Archbishop, in his injunctions for the better government of the same, appointed two Friars Preachers and two Friars Minors (or four of each if necessary) as permanent confessors to the Convent[507]. In 1291 he wrote to the Prior of St. Frideswide’s urging him to confer the church of St. Peter le Bailey on some one devoted to the Friars Minors and nominated by them[508]. While strenuously asserting the right of the Minorites to hear confessions in spite of the opposition of the parish priests[509], he forbade the Carmelites and Austin Friars at Oxford to hear any confessions of any persons whatsoever, regular or secular, clerk or lay, male or female, and ordered the Archdeacon, if they disobeyed, to pronounce public sentence of excommunication on them[510]. Arguing that ‘it was lawful to change a vow for a better one[511],’ he maintained that the Franciscans might, as they had hitherto done, admit members of other religious bodies to their Order; he would, he wrote to the Chancellor of the University of Oxford, himself admit them, if he were still Provincial Minister. ‘We have heard with great surprise,’ he proceeds, ‘that the Prior and friars of the Order of St. Augustine in Oxford are imposing the mark of excommunication on the Friars Minors of Oxford, and defaming them in many ways, for receiving one of their friars in the aforesaid canonical form. We therefore order you to go in person to the Austin friary and warn them, in our name and by our authority, to cease from these detractions. But if they assert that they have raised this tumult against the Minorites on the ground of some privilege of theirs, you shall ask them to let me have a copy of their privilege to compare with those of the Minorites which we have to maintain; and we will certainly not allow them to be molested in contravention of their privilege; nor will we endure that the Friars Minors be injuriously oppressed, for by so doing we should break the commands of the Pope[512].’ Peckham further, while condemning the erroneous opinions of the Dominicans at Oxford, denied the claim to superiority which they put forward[513]. The Franciscans claimed precedence on the ground of their humility (which of course dwindled in inverse ratio as their assertion of it grew), and of their absolute poverty. The Archbishop enunciated the formula which was condemned by the inquisitors and the Pope in the next century, and which formed, so to speak, the text of the controversy, ‘_De paupertate Christi_.’ He defined the poverty of the apostles to be